Re: <nettime> no 'email' in .fr: 'courriel'

[A Dontigny <ad@electrocd.com>]

Funny to see our little neologism travel to France... and then have 
it trown back filtered by this unhealthy anti-French bias by the US.

I live in Quebec and "courriel" has effectively replaced "email" in 
our media, on websites and in more formal correspondance on the 
internet over the last years.

France's everyday urban vocabulary relies hugely on english 
borrowings, a lot more than Quebec, a Canadian province with a long 
border with the US. Our particular geographic and historic heritage 
brought up a different kind of language decadence in the 
french-speaking population, mostly syntaxical.

I think the last time a linguistic borrowing from Quebec caused 
debate in France was the officialization of gender neologism for 
human professions, easily adopted in Quebec over the last decade 
("compositrice", "directrice" or "professeure" meaning a woman 
occupying the job and not "the director's" or "the composers'" 
"spouse"). There was a lot of resistence from part of the linguistic 
academia, mostly arguing that the arbitrary "gender" of those words 
were directly inherited from latin.


>      [ via <tbyfield@panix.com>]
>
>< http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/6333463.htm >
>
>    Posted on Fri, Jul. 18, 2003
>   
>    French Government Bans Term 'E-Mail'
 <...>


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a_dontigny

http://www.notype.com/a_dontigny
http://www.electrocd.com/bio.e/dontigny_ai.html
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